The rantings of a working mom of twins with a serious fiber addiction

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My folks are in town for a few months. They’re what you might call “Snowbirds”.

This means I get to enjoy the awesomeness that is my mom’s cooking, but I don’t have to worry about an air mattress taking up valuable living room space because they are staying at the Holiday Inn. This means I won’t have to wait until March to block my knits! Woohoo!

Not that I could share them with you yet anyway. We’re still in Crafty Christmas mode and with the date of the gift exchange being pushed to February (at Stitches West), I am going to need the floor space at some point.

But I digress…

Now that my parents are here, we get to spend lots of quality time around the dining room table, which is something we don’t usually get to enjoy. Why is this, you ask? Because I am one busy mom! Unfortunately, most days I don’t have a lot of time to cook. I get off work, pick up the kids, take them to their various after school thingies…by the time we get home, it’s nearly bedtime. Everything feels rushed. Now that Grandma and Grandpa are here, we get home cooked meals that are done by the time I get home with the kids. We get to sit around the table and tell stories.

Recently we were having dinner and talking about crafting. While the kids were talking about their Rainbow/Crazy/Whateveryoucallthoserubberband Looms, I made a comment about how they seem to prefer using my crochet hooks over using the hooks that are included in the kits. My mom then mentioned that she she probably still has her crochet hooks somewhere, well, the ones my dad didn’t take. Huh? Why would my dad need crochet hooks?

My dad is a former employee of Michigan Bell/Ameritech/AT&T. Nearly all of his adult life he spent working as a Cable Splicing Technician. He was one of those guys who climbed poles and worked in manholes and made sure you had phone service despite the heavy rain or ice. He would tell us stories about working overtime when there was a bad storm, or about all the weird stuff that he would see when he had to venture into Detroit. He brought home his truck when we lost power at home so we could plug the fridge into the generator (and would become part of a story I consider infamous in our family).

He sat there and told us how he would ask to use my mom’s crochet hooks for work. He said he would use them for pulling wires in tight spaces. Hopefully he wasn’t pulling anything with an electrical current…’cause I suspect that most of the crocheters in my family have a preference for metal hooks. We are also a clumsy lot.